This article first appeared in Personal Wealth, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on July 18 - 24, 2016.
Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind offers insight into how our personal experiences have shaped our financial attitudes. In this excerpt, Sarah Newcomb suggests that we look at the stories we tell ourselves to uncover our core beliefs about money as they have an impact on our financial decisions.
You might think that if something is a core belief then it must already be obvious to us, but this isn’t always the case. Sometimes our beliefs are deep within our unconscious understanding of life. If your beliefs about money are not immediately obvious to you, how do you go about uncovering them? Writing your financial story can help. I find that writing is better than just thinking about it because by writing things down, we tend to create some sort of storyline, whereas when we just think of our financial story, we can see a jumble of mental images and events without much of a meaningful arc. Our core beliefs are more apparent when we look at the stories we are telling ourselves, so I encourage you to write your story down.
To help you do so, think about this: Up to this point, if money were a character in your life’s story, would it be a friend or an enemy? You can also think about the money messages you were told or otherwise exposed to growing up. What were your parents’ attitudes about money? Who were your greatest financial influences, for good or bad? Like the little boy on the school bus who decided he would be rich one day because he hated the feeling of having less than the people around him and feared their judgment, were there any defining moments that triggered strong emotional responses within you? Did the people who surrounded you growing up view money as good or evil? How do you feel now when you think about the money in your life? Have you made any financial promises to yourself? All of these questions can help you write out your story. There is also a worksheet at the end of the book to help you through this process.
The financial stories I have shared from other people are quite short, but the interviews they are taken from were far more lengthy and detailed. I encourage you to really take the time to think through your financial experiences from early childhood until now. Look for the patterns you have come to find meaningful. There is a narrative inside of you, and a story you are telling yourself. That story already influences your financial decisions because it is based on your core beliefs. By finding and articulating the story, you are one step closer to uncovering your core beliefs about money. Then, and only then, can you decide if those beliefs are serving you well, or if you need to challenge them.
Challenging core beliefs
Once you know your story, it will give you clues about your core beliefs. Was money a friend or an enemy in your story? Was it a hero or a villain? In your story, where is the power? Does a higher power rule the day, or are you in the driver’s seat? If your story were a fable, what would the “moral” be at the end? Try to put the lesson of your financial story into one sentence. This is a core financial belief.
The greatest turning point in my financial life came when I discovered my core beliefs about money. By writing about my experiences with money from early childhood up to that point (in my late 20s), I found that the two most influential money messages that I was holding on to at the time had sort of merged themselves into one core belief: “I am not supposed to have money because it is evil”.
It was a powerful awakening to see these words written out so simply. Did I really believe this? Yes, I realised, I did believe it. I believed it so deeply, in fact, that not only had I avoided focusing on making money, but whenever I had extra money I spent it or gave it away. I had thought this was because I was either irresponsible or generous (or both), but in fact it is because I was scared. I felt exactly as John Wesley did when he said, “Money never stays with me. It would burn me if it did. I throw it out of my hands as soon as possible, lest it find its way into my heart.” In fact, whenever I had anything more than I personally needed for survival, I felt deeply guilty. Even a very small amount of savings made me feel as if I were personally taking food out of the mouths of people who needed that money more than I did. My early religious upbringing, my experiences with lack as a child, and all of the examples of injustice and inequality I had witnessed in the world around me had combined in my mind to create a narrative where money was a perpetrator of evil, and I wanted nothing to do with that.
Once I saw how much of an enemy I had made money into in my mental narrative, I finally understood how that one belief had led me to countless acts of financial self-sabotage. For example, at 22, I had been offered a recording contract. Up to that point, this had been my life’s greatest dream. Instead of jumping for joy and accepting the opportunity, I froze. The producer was talking about some big numbers. He wanted me to get comfortable with the idea of riding in a limousine. His talk reminded me of the stereotypical rich characters I had come to loathe, and I was terrified that I would be selling out if I followed that path. The “starving artist” stories came to mind as examples of people who were pure-hearted and true to their art, and he sounded like the fat cat who ate starving artists for breakfast. I turned it down. I could have had my dream career at 22. I could have made a living doing what I loved at a very early age, and I turned it down because of the stories I was telling myself about money.
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